Electronic spreadsheets are a form of flat-file database and offer an extremely flexible environment for capturing or modeling data, both graphical and textual, in a myriad of applications, such as accounting, data processing, etc. An exemplary spreadsheet program is Microsoft Excel, published by Microsoft Corporation, located in Redmond, Wash. In addition to allowing data within a given spreadsheet, typically referred to as “worksheet,” to be related, e.g. allow reference or links between data items, these programs further allow the creation and relation of independent data files, each data file, typically referred to as a “workbook,” containing one or more worksheets, i.e. separate flat-file databases, to further enhance flexibility. The ability to relate worksheets, and the data contained therein, within or across workbooks permits data to be linked allowing for more flexible application design. For example, utilizing multiple interlinked worksheets and workbooks permits a user to capture or model complex relationships which may be too cumbersome to capture or model in a single worksheet.
Often it is desirable to share worksheets or workbooks with other users, and in particular, with other users who may not have access to the original spreadsheet program by which the worksheets or workbooks were created. It is therefore useful to be able to convert the spreadsheets or workbooks from the proprietary file format used by the particular spreadsheet program to a non-proprietary format which can be easily shared. One such non-proprietary format is the Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”) which may be viewed using any standard HTML compatible browser program, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, published by Microsoft Corporation, located in Redmond, Wash. or Netscape, published by Netscape Communications Corp, located in San Jose, Calif. Once converted, the HTML representation of the worksheets or workbooks may be easily shared with others.
Microsoft Excel makes a built-in HTML converter available. This converter makes it possible to convert an individual workbook (made up of a plurality of worksheets), or to convert a single worksheet, into HTML. However, converting a plurality of separate files, i.e. workbooks, is not supported; in particular, references between data items or worksheets which span multiple workbooks, e.g. hyperlinks between workbooks, i.e. between worksheets in different workbooks, are not converted to HTML by Excel's conversion functionality.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method to convert references which span workbooks to proper HTML hyperlinks when the workbooks are converted to HTML.